The purpose of this course is to provide students with an introduction to the technologies of data and voice communications. After completing the course, students should have an understanding of the major technological issues in telecommunications, as well as the approaches that have been taken to address them.
We will cover transmission media, signals, reliable information transfer techniques (link layer protocols), and routing. We will discuss simple, point-to-point communications, as well as the more sophisticated techniques used in the Internet. We will also spend a small amount of time considering voice communications techniques and systems.
This course will be organized around the major questions in telecommunications. Each class meeting will be focussed on the principle questions - these are not rhetorical, and I expect students to answer them. Because you need (and presumably expect) to learn the state of the art, I will be either guiding you to deduce or presenting you with the specifics of content in each class.